Pentagon pulls 25 years of weapons testing data from public access to block AI-powered espionage

The Pentagon quietly removed decades of weapons testing publications from its public website on July 30, 2026. The rationale: unclassified data, when fed into modern AI systems, can become something that looks a lot like classified intelligence. Amy Henninger, the Pentagon’s Director of the Weapons Testing Office, framed the decision as a straightforward operational security call. Foreign adversaries now have the tools to aggregate seemingly harmless public documents and extract insights that the U.S. never intended to share. The aggregation problem, explained The pulled material comes from the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation office, known as DOT&E. That office produces annual reports on weapons programs that have historically been available to the public, to Congress, and to defense researchers. Twenty-five years of those reports are now offline. The department characterized its move as proactive rather than reactive, suggesting it acted before a known breach rather than after one. Transparency concerns are already surfacing Critics aren’t buying the security framing entirely. The restriction lands at an awkward moment: the DOT&E office has also seen staffing r...